V. I. Lenin

Speech at a Meeting of

The Railwaymen of Moscow Junction[1]

Brief Newspaper Report

Written:5 February, 1920First Published:Petrogradskaya PravdaNo. 28; February 7, 1920; Published according to thePetrogradskaya PravdatextSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 345-346Translated:George HannaTranscription/HTML Markup:David Walters & Robert CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

V. I. Lenin, greeted with stormy applause, delivered a long
    speech.

“The most outstanding fact in the world situation,”
    said Comrade Lenin, “is the peace with Estonia. This peace
    is a window into Europe. It opens up before us the possi-bility of
    beginning an exchange of goods with the West. Our enemies
    maintained that the revolution in the West is far away and that we
    would not be able to hold out without it. We have not only held
    out, however, we have won a vic-tory.

“We won without obtaining a single cartridge from
    any-where, we won only because the workers and Red Army sol-diers
    know what they are fighting for.

“If the small nations that
      are playthings in the hands of the Entente begin to wish for peace
      with Soviet Russia, this is to be explained by our having shown in
      practice how the imperialists have deceived them and how gladly
      the Russian proletariat extends to them the hand of peace. Poland
      will follow Estonia. Information has been received that Soviet
      Russia’s peace proposals will be discussed in Poland. This
      bloodless victory is of tremendous importance.”

Lenin went over to the internal situation and showed that it
    boiled down to a struggle against chaos on the rail-ways. Railway
    transport was hanging by a hair. If the trains stopped running
    that would mean the end of the proletar-ian centres. Heroic
    efforts on the part of the masses of  workers would be needed to
    maintain transport and facilitate the struggle against hunger and
    cold. Unparalleled heroism proved possible during the Civil War
    which claimed so many victims, and that heroism and those
    sacrifices that decided the war in our favour were still essential
    now that the war had shifted to another front, the industrial
    front. Victory was now essential on this bloodless front.

“It must be understood that sacrifices are also needed
    here,” continued the speaker. “Sacrifices must be made
    to restore the country’s economy. ’Victory or
    Death’ must be-come the slogan on the industrial front. It
    is necessary for workers to be conscious of the need for the
    tensest struggle for victory on this front. There is a hard
    struggle ahead and it will have to be carried on by tired and
    hungry workers; If, however, they realise that the fate of the
    working class depends on the outcome of this struggle, they will
    win out.”

The question of transport was being discussed by the Council of
    Defence, but the workers themselves would have to muster for the
    struggle against the transport chaos and the profiteering that
    intensified the chaos. Those who did not give their grain
    surpluses to the state were turning the railways into an
    instrument for profiteering, they were enemies, and
    politically-conscious workers should muster for the struggle
    against them.

“We led the Red Army to victory by strict, iron
    disci-pline as well as agitation. What has been organised in the
    Red Army must also be created on all the fronts of labour The
    entire experience of the creation of the Red Army must be
    transferred to the army of railway workers so that it can rise to
    the same heights as the Red Army. Without sacrifice, without iron
    discipline, without the employment of special-ists the Red Army
    would not have been victorious, and with-out them the railway army
    will not be victorious.” (Ap-plause.)

[1]The meeting was held in Moscow, February 5-6, 1920. It was
    attended by more than 1,000 people. The agenda was the following:
    the international situation; the fight against economic
    dislocation; labour conscription; transport; social security;
    tasks of the B.C.P. in the proletarian revolution; public health
    services; food problem.

The Conference was held at a time when
    transport was the main
 sector of the labour front. The supply of raw material and fuel to factories and food for the population depended on the work of the railways. In a very short time thousands of locomotives and trucks and  many railway lines and bridges had to be repaired. The Party mobilised Communists and assigned them to work on the railways; Lenin delivered the opening speech at this Conference. The resolution adopted by the Conference proposed to concentrate the entire attention of the country and the efforts of the working class on the internal development of Soviet Russia and particularly on the industrial and economic front. The Conference called upon all railwaymen to form “the Red Labour Transport Army with strict labour discipline”.